Games:EDU ’07 celebrates successful show

The organisers of Games:EDU ’07, the education-related event that runs alongside the Develop conference, are celebrating another successful year.

This year’s event took the theme of ‘Talent and Technology’, and built upon last year’s inaugral event with a record number of high-profile companies taking part.

“It is amazing how far we have come in 12 months," said Toby Barnes, MD of Pixel-Lab, the organisers of the event.

"Last year’s event focused on the need for industry to engage with academia. In the last 12 months this appears to have been taken on board, with industry representatives from Disney, Blitz, EA, Rare, Sony, Epic, Evolution, NC Soft and many more engaging in the debate. Now is the hard part: how can the two worlds work together?"

The day was attended by over 110 people – a third of which were from the games industry – and spanned twelve sessions. Highlights from the event included a talk from Chris Satchell, head of Microsoft’s XNA team, about reaching out to new computer science students through providing game and interactive visualisation environments for students to program with, and SCEE’s Sarah Lemarié who unveiled the Sony PSP Academia Programme.

There’s still ground to cover before that gap between academia and the games industry is closed, however, and to that end Games:EDU will return for next year’s Develop conference 2008.

Slides from the presentations will be available soon from the official Games:EDU website, as will audio recordings of selected sessions.